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Saturday, December 11, 2010

Have you seen this?

I just watched this TED talk from Conrad Wolfram about using computers in math. Have you seen it?

I was watching thinking, "Great! But what about the test when they have to compute? And what about when they get to AP Calc but they can't do the computation they need to solve the problems that they'll have to do on the AP Test?" Wolfram addressed this near the end of his talk, but even he doesn't have a good solution. He's basically saying that we need a complete overhaul of the whole system. Everything needs to change. I can't imagine that'll happen any time soon!

2 comments:

I'm not sure I understand your comment about "what about the test where you have to compute?"

If we over-hauled the system from start to finish there would be no test where you would have to compute. You'd use authentic tasks from start to finish and make sure the important thing the kids learned was, where's the math in this?